The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake

In a day's work -- a Presidential candidate and plain-speak from Cuba
End of history? Not a hope in Colombo, where on a day of limitless possibility last week, a US Presidential candidate looking perhaps a little like Clint Eastwood playing an American unionist, together with a Cuban Ambassador, put Americans and America to shame.

A week earlier the United States political office in Colombo showcased one Professor Davis who spoke on the US constitution. He didn't put on a very good performance either -- and with Bill Van Auken, the Socialist Presidential candidate calling the United States a dangerously weakened polity, one would think the Cold War had been re-visited.

Bill Van Auken, who against the backdrop of the not so ritzy old-world Nippon Hotel in Slave Island Colombo looked like a Presidential candidate making a pitch when Howard Taft and Theodore (Bull Moose) Roosevelt were running for the American Presidency, said something to the effect that the United Sates might invade Sri Lanka if there is no oil, at least on some other account. Incidentally, Roosevelt escaped assassination during his Presidential campaign in the early 1900s when a bullet entered his chest but was deflected from its full force by a fifty page speech in his coat pocket.

So, words can indeed be powerful. Perhaps Auken has not heard of Trincomalee. Though the Americans will not invade on account of Trincomalee, if you would listen to the analysts, Uncle Sam would do almost anything short of invading to secure control of this important sea port in the Indian ocean.

But, what was seen in the form of Van Auken seeking to inform Sri Lankans about the struggle of the proletariat in America and the Cuban ambassador trying to educate us about the American economic blockade against Cuba, was the fact that there is a considerable rear-guard against George Bush's foreign policy of playing God operating from Pennsylvania Avenue.

You need to also remember that there is almost a pathological hatred that Americans harbour against the Cubans, and a pathological hatred that Americans harbour against Marxists such as Auken -- the latter which of course has now been watered down since the era of the Red Menace in which communists in America were actively persecuted. If there is any reason that Van Auken looks more quaint than menacing in American eyes today, it is because the Cold War is over, and communism is for all intents and purposes dead in the American reckoning.

But there is no such reprieve for Cubans. Cuban Ambassador Enna Vian Valdez is a very intense lady - diminutive, but yet that does not show when she is seated, giving hell to the Americans on the economic blockade. Of all the scrupulously assembled facts and figures that she had arraigned for the purpose of debunking this blockade, what struck me was the one contention that the sanctions indeed constituted genocide.

She says: According to the Geneva convention of 9 December 1948, genocide is defined as "(….) .. those acts perpetrated with the intent to totally or partially destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.''

Those acts include the "intentional submission of such group to conditions of existence that may bring about its total or partial destruction.'' Let George Bush hear that, because he says that the "American mission is to spread freedom around the world.'' How about spreading a little American trade-marked genocide along with that too, Mr President - just a dollop?

Cuba for instance has absolutely no access to international financial agencies -- and believe it or not, Cuba is forbidden from using the American dollar in its foreign transactions.

On the face of these facts, it is possible to say that the American hatred of Cuba is a pathological one. When there is a pathological hatred, it can be manifest in ways that are irrational -- and it is therefore in this particular context that we need to say that both Auken's press conference and the Cuban ambassador's briefing held last Wednesday were in the order of the subversive. As not much else myself except a plain and simple humanist with an empathy for the underdog, it was special to be witness to the subversive events of that day. The hardboiled American antipathy against such subversive activity could have been, in a different era, definitely quite severe. Billy Auken or anybody who listened to him during the days of Mc Carty's red-baiting would have been persecuted, dismissed from employment and so forth, and otherwise hunted down.

Though things are different today, last Wednesday's events were yet subversive enough perhaps to earn a blackmark for those of us who participated in the Cuban exercise, and the American candidate's press conference. Big brother will be watching you more intensely from now on, comrades.

But the flip side of it is that this is a country that has a more accommodating word-view than America, and therefore one that can weather the American juggernaut. There was no red baiting here in Sri Lanka, and coming back from the press conference venue, a journalist (comrade?) and I discerned the remnants of a previously Reddish era: Colvin R De Silva Mawatha, the Philip Gunewardene playground etc., The hotel Nippon ambience is itself looking much like a remnant of a gorgeous past now run-down, both in terms of façade and the people who tend to congregate there. No smart PR boys in blow dried hair compeering this press conference. Instead, gentlemen with white and oiled hair and less than ironed shirts presided, themselves looking somewhat crumpled, dowdy and almost weather-beaten.

But it's precisely due to these qualities of almost other worldly stubbornness and resistance that Bill Van Auken says he chose Sri Lanka as the place to be during the American Presidential election. It's a wise choice, considering that he couldn't get himself on the ballot in more than five states. But Auken thinks that he can ignite the passions of the working class from Sri Lanka, and sensitise the people of the world against American imperialism.

Apart from the separate prospects for both Van Auken and the Ambassador, this says something for us. Sri Lanka is not a place where Uncle Sam can bring a few exponents of American jurisprudence, impress a few journalists and further the American diktat -- but neither is it a place where George. W. Bush can install some upwardly mobile lackey just returned from one year at an obscure American polytechnic so that the country can be suitably regime-changed. It's a country with a greater heritage of freedom of expression than the American nation - - as Van Auken said himself. He said: "I never get this kind of press back home.''

All that's not by way making a boast about Sri Lanka, but to say that there are countries which have far from succumbed to the neo-liberal idea of American moksha. Perhaps the likes of Auken and the Ambassador Emma Viant therefore signify the first seeds in a global effort to root out the American menace?Who knows?? Cuba’s existence is a miracle enough, and there could be more to come in that order.

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